Are You Willing To Do What It Takes?

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, and today I want to talk with you about becoming more confident, less nice, more boldly yourself. Now that's not a brand new theme for this show, but today I want to ask you a few direct, key, possibly hard hitting questions that will actually serve you. They might make you uncomfortable in the moment, but they're going to serve you to become this more bold, free version of you. So I'm very excited about today's episode. I think it's really going to serve you. If this is not your first episode and you've been listening to any number of these episodes and benefiting from, then I'm gonna have a request for you. Don't worry, it's not gonna cost you anything. These episodes are absolutely free. And that's actually part of the point. I have a larger mission which is called Operation Mass Liberation and the goal there is to help free as many people who are stuck in some place of social anxiety, shyness, niceness, to become more boldly themselves. And this show is a part of that. And the best way you could support this show, if you are liking it, is to write a check for $999 and send it to my no is to go to itunes and or Apple podcasts, I believe it's called now, and give this show a review. Because the way that benefits me is twofold. One, it helps more people find the show and two, when I go out there to interview guests or try to, you know, draw people to the show, which helps increase the profile of the show, gets you great material and new insights, and helps broaden the reach. You know, if someone sees that the show has a lot of reviews, it makes it more credible. So that would really support me in supporting as many people as possible. So if you've not done that, please take a few minutes to do that sometime today. Thank you. You are awesome. Now back to being more boldly and freely yourself. Right? That's what you're here for, to become more confident, to be more you. So the question that I'm going to keep coming back to in this episode, which might at your answer might change over the course of this episode. Like, the first answer you give me might be different than 10 minutes later. But the question is basically this. Do you really want to be confident, free, and boldly yourself? Now, your first response might be, no, duh. That's why I'm listening to this show, this episode, this, you know, that's why I'm focusing on this. That's why I'm reading your books or other people's books and really trying to study this. Okay, so it seems kind of obvious that you want it, but do you really want it? Do you really want it? Because we say we want things all over the place, but we don't actually want to do what it takes to create that, you know? Yeah, I want a successful business. Sure, that sounds great. If someone said, hey, do you want blank? And we focus on the blank, not the. What it takes to acquire, achieve, grow into, cultivate, build the blank. Well say, sure. Hey, you want a nice mansion? Sure. Do you want a bunch of money? Sure. Do you want a ton of confidence? Sure. Want to live forever? Why not throw it in? And what does it actually take to create that? You know, this is best summed up a good friend of mine and an amazing coach and someone who supports me in all the virtual events I do all the live events. He's been involved in business for many years. An amazing man, Ben Gibson. He speaks Norwegian and he has taught other people to speak Norwegian. And when someone would come to him to learn Norwegian, he'd say, do you want to know how to speak Norwegian? And they would say, yeah, that sounds. That's why I'm here. I want to. I want to do lessons with you or train tutoring with you. And he'd say, great. Do you want to learn to speak Norwegian? And that was his way of addressing. What I'm pointing at here is we want the end result. But do you want to do what? What it actually takes another way to ask this question is, what are you more committed to? Your freedom, your liberation, your confidence, you becoming you or something else. And you might again, on a conscious level initially think, well, no, that's the most important thing to me. But is it really? There are many people I talk to. There's a spectrum of who I talk to. There are some people that are interested in learning about this kind of from an intellectual or academic perspective. There's people that want to interview me just because it's interesting to them or for their audience. There's people who really want to learn and grow. There's people who want to discover more about themselves. They're kind of psychologically minded and interested. I don't think any of those people are likely to have a radical change. I gotta say, never. But it's because something is missing. And then there's people that I talk to who say, I gotta do something here. I gotta make this change. And then all of a sudden, my ears start to perk up. I say, tell me more. And I say, well, geez, I can't. You know, I'm stuck in this way. It's so frustrating. And they're suffering. And now. Now my head's nodded. I'm like, yeah. And then I go even further with them. I say, so what do you think will happen if you don't make this change? What are you gonna miss out on in your life? And that's not me being a jerk. That's me serving people. Because there was many years in my life where I was too nice to ask those kind of questions. And now I do, just straight up. Because I want them to suffer. I want them to feel that pain. Because we can live in effing denial for so long. Like, wouldn't you want. If you're going to a medical professional and you are eating Big Macs and smoking cigarettes, wouldn't you want them to say, hey, you know you're gonna die in 12 years if you keep this up? And you know what? Even more importantly than that, let's look at your life right now. Because if you say in 12 years, people are like, yeah, whatever, who cares? That's the future. My future self will deal with that. I'm gonna go have that Big Mac and take a puff right now. Okay, what about an hour later after you do that? What about 30 minutes after you do that? What about having radically more energy and feeling energized and alive right now? Because you can make the changes in your health and have that right now plus live longer than 12 years. Right? And it's the same thing when it comes to making these changes around social anxiety and niceness. And calling it Big Mac and cigarettes is not that far off as far as an analogy. Because these patterns are essentially addictions. These being the pattern of social anxiety, of excessive niceness, of people pleasing. They're like addictions. You might say, no, I don't. This is my personality. I don't. I'm not choosing that. Those people are choosing to go drink. Well, there's a. Plenty of people that have a theory that says, no, it's your. It's your genetics. People are just predisposed to alcoholism and other things. I'm just predisposed to being a nice guy. I'm just predisposed to anxiety. That's just how it is. My mom had it, my dad had it, my cousin had it, my dog has it. Everybody's got it. So there you go. And then you can have that story, and you can defend that story, and you can find lots of professionals that will support you in that story. But where does that lead you in your life? Does it lead you to where you really want to be? Because there's a whole set of other professionals, other qualified people, other intelligent people who say, you know, there's actually another way to see this. There's another way that allows for more freedom. Now, I don't know about you, but if there was a problem that I was facing in my life and I wanted to seek out several professionals, and one of them told me, hey, this is just how it is. You're going to die from this. Or, this is just how it is. You're going to have this for the rest of your life. Sorry, deal with it. Here's some meds where I went to another professional and said, you know what? Yeah, a lot of people think that, but I've actually helped a lot of people completely free themselves of this and not need any meds, whose protocol would you go try? And again, when you hear this intellectually, comfortably, in your car or where, you know, in your house, you'd say, oh, I would choose the second protocol. I mean, what am I, an idiot? Well, it reveals something. If you do not choose the one that offers liberation, and particularly it reveals your addiction to comfort, your addiction to certainty, to predictability, to stability. Because most people prioritize. They value comfort and the familiar and being right. Those are all forms of certainty. Gives you a sense of security, stability, control, the illusion of control. They value that more than they value freedom, connection, love, growth, progress, transformation, contribution, purpose, and meaning. Now, if people look at a list of adjectives on paper, obviously everyone would choose that second list. That sounds like a much better life. But when it comes to the moment, most people choose the quick hit, gratification of comfort over those other things. And so we come back to not just most people, but you and me right here. And I'm Asking you this question. Do you really want to be free? Do you really want to learn Norwegian? Do you really want to learn confidence? Do you really want to do what it takes to liberate yourself? Because it's going to involve breaking those habits. And when the person who's been eating the Big Macs and smoking the cigarettes for 10 years, 20 years, decides to stop, how do you think they feel on day one of not smoking or not going to get the fast food? Think they feel fantastic and liberated and alive and great? No. There's probably a little bit of a period of detox, and they're probably going to feel uncomfortable, unregulated, destabilized, anxious. They're just going to have all kinds of emotions moving through them. They're going to feel pain. Because the addictions that we have, whether it's to fast food or cigarettes or your phone or other tech or screens or porn or comfort and certainty, mental patterns of knowing and predicting and trying to be right all the time and living in your head, those are all forms of comfort seeking and the addiction to control all of those. Addictions serve one universal function. To try to not feel pain. That's what addiction is, is I'm going to use this pattern, behavior, substance to not feel pain, to turn down or turn off my pain. I'll never forget there's a guy named Vic who worked in a rehab center, and that's where I worked for a year. And they helped homeless veterans who were addicted to drugs live there and then, you know, get clean and then restart their lives. And Vic was one of the counselors there who's an addiction counselor, who was a vet himself, who'd gone through the program many years ago, super successful at it, and ended up dedicating his career and life to helping other guys and gals break free from addiction. So, amazing guy. But I remember I was talking to one day over lunch, and he was telling me about when he first got into heroin because he'd done some other drugs, like drinking, and nothing had hooked him yet. But he was not living the greatest life, but he was doing okay. And then he was overwhelmed by his problems, Money problems, relationship problems, family problems. And he said, I never forget that first day that someone gave me heroin, and I took it. And he said, for the first time, everything just stopped, all the pain. And he said, you know, I thought it was just the pain of my girlfriend problems and my family problems and my money problems. He realized I'd been in pain my whole life, and for the first time, there was A peace where that was just turned off for 2, 3, 4 hours. He said I was hooked. I just kept going back. Now, of course, if you ever talk to anyone who's addicted to these substances, ever watched your own cycles of addiction, ever watched a movie about addiction, you see that at first it turns off all the pain, but then it creates what? Yeah, more pain. A lot more pain. Just endless, exponentially more pain. And so when we stop these substances, these patterns, these habits, these addictions, there's some pain waiting for you. And look, this might not be your get rich quick scheme. Get confidence quick scheme. Hey, I'm going to tell you one thing and you do this whiz bango. No pain, no discomfort, you're free forever. But there is no magic bullet. And I'll tell you this throughout this show and through any of my materials. Look, confidence is an inside job. It's a skill. It's a muscle. You got to build it. And anyone that tells you you can get fit quick and easy with no effort, it's a lie. It's a marketing ploy. Anyone tells you you can get confidence quick and easy with no effort, it's a lie. You got to build this. It's a muscle. That's why the main way I work with people is a year long program. And sometimes people stay for two. It's a training program, it's a gym. Because that's the only real way to build confidence. Because what's going to happen is if you say, you know what, I'm going to be less nice. You might have done this. This happens all the time. People read my book not nice and they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm fired up, gonna be real and go tell my brother like it is or whatever. And they start to do it and they don't necessarily feel great. I feel scared, they feel anxious, they feel overwhelmed, they feel bad. They feel like they're breaking some cardinal sin by speaking up for themselves or taking care of themselves or saying no to somebody, God forbid. And there's this confusion that can result from that. Wait a minute, I thought this was supposed to feel good. Well, yeah, eventually. And the results are good for your life over time. But initially it's going to make put you into contact with a couple things that you've been running from your whole life. And some of those things are you can't control what other people think of you and you've been trying to control. That's one of the biggest control addictions I see in social anxiety. Niceness is you are Hooked on controlling other people you might not see. No, nice people are not controlling. We're not control freaks. We're not yelling at people and tell them what to do and bossing them around. Not that kind of control freak. Because that wouldn't be nice. No, no, no. I'm demeaning. I'm flexible. I'm submissive, I'm friendly, I'm accommodating. So I'm nice. I don't do that. My control is a lot more subtle. What I'm going to do is I'm going to be really warm and jovial and I'm going to laugh and smile more than I normally do to get you to like me so that you'll keep working with me or that you'll hire me or that you'll sleep with me. At least that's the plan. The last one just generally doesn't work for guys listening. If you're gonna be super nice and hope that she'll sleep with you, it's not gonna work. I never say never, but, man, I played that strategy for a long time and it was largely unsuccessful. But still, that's the attempt, right? The attempt is to control the social anxiety version of that is, well, I'm just not gonna go talk to you, and then I'm gonna control that you don't dislike me because I didn't go talk to you, so you have nothing to dislike, sucker. But none of these work. They don't actually work. But you're attempting to control. You're addicted to the control. Doesn't mean you get it. That's like someone who's really addicted to a substance is trying to get the pleasure, but they're not going to get the pleasure. It starts to go away after a while, so they don't really work. And yet when you decide, I'm going to be more real, you decide, I'm going to start taking more risks. You decide I'm going to start taking more bold action in your life. You're going to have to face the fact that you don't have control, and it's going to feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. There's an uncomfortable emotion with that. And at the. At the root of it, the discomfort is there's no armor between me and life. Because that's another way to think about social anxiety and niceness. This is armor between you and life. It's a defended life. And when you start to take real risk, real action, really get out of your head and into your mind. You start to connect with life and those around you. And you realize that you're not armored. You're soft and gushy, and you're connected to everything. And you're going to love, and then you're going to lose. And it's going to hurt when you lose. But what else are you going to do? Live in your room, Be a rock, be an island. Avoid all connection. Have a moat between you and walls and steel and spikes and archers and all these defenses to protect you from others and from life. Well, how long you been doing that? And how's that working for you? So when I ask you, are you really ready to do what it takes, then ask yourself, are you willing to be uncomfortable? Are you willing to go into the fire? Are you willing to face the challenge? Willing to face the pain? Willing to face the discomfort? And this is the question that I ask people before I start to work with them. And, you know, you can really tell it's not what someone says, it's what they do. So someone's like, yeah, totally ready. Okay, what are you gonna do? I don't know yet. But something. Something's totally gonna happen. Okay, that's like. The person's like, I'm totally gonna get in shape. Oh, yeah, Cool. What's your plan? Well, let me tell you, I. It's a lot, all right? It's too big. It's too complicated to talk about right now, but it's gonna be. It's gonna be big. Trust me. It's gonna be huge. Okay. All right. Now, they're in that. What they call. In change psychology, they call it the pre contemplation. No, the contemplation stage. And so there's pre contemplation. I don't remember the model. This is back in my graduate school days. I should probably reference the models that actually remember pre contemplation, contemplation, action, something or other. Here, let me look it up real quick. Pre contemplation, pre contemplation, phase, stages of change model. Hey, look at that. Pre contemplation, contemplation, preparation, slash, determination, action, and then maintenance. So pre contemplation is. You don't even think about it. You don't even really know that it's. You want to make a change that's just kind of living in the soup. Then there's contemplation, which is you're acknowledging that there's a problem, but not yet ready, sure of wanting or lacks the confidence to make a change. That's where I talk to people all day long. They're in that contemplation stage. And here's the painful part. They're waiting for the confidence to. To then start to make the change. But confidence doesn't come first. Confidence is the byproduct of action. It comes after. It comes after. After you do it, then you get the confidence. So then you get to go into the determination stage. Preparation, determination. That's where you're like, all right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to read this book. And you're not just reading the book passively. You're like, I'm going to figure this out. And what I found is that people that are in that determination preparation stage actually take a more. A larger action step than just reading my book. So maybe it's like joining one of my programs or getting my confidence University or for you, there's an opportunity right now to come to Not Nice Live. I probably should have mentioned that earlier in this episode, but we have Not Nice Live is the virtual event that's coming up in about a month and a half or so. And we're having super early bird tickets on sale right now, so you can get yourself a ticket to that. That will be more of that determination stage. And then the action stage will be showing up to the workshop because you might say, wait a minute, I got my ticket. It's virtual, by the way, so you can come from anywhere. So it's not even that hard to get there. But there's people who will get the ticket and not come. I know. That's crazy, right? So why would someone do that? What a strange thing. It's not that mysterious or baffling. It's just, what stage of change are they in? They're in contemplation. Like, I got to do something about this. Okay, yeah, this is a problem. I should probably face it, but I don't know. It's uncomfortable. And then they tipped. The scales tipped, and they went into the preparation or determination stage. Preparation is like, you know what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna get ready. I'm gonna order that book. I'm gonna get that ticket to the workshop, and then it's on, baby. And the thing about the preparation stage is it's still. The discomfort is still a little bit at bay. It's not, you know, infinitely far away like it is in pre contemplation. But the discomfort's tomorrow, in two weeks when the workshop is. Or that's a little ways away. I'm just gonna. I'll get to it, though. I'm gonna do it and then the people that actually show up are in the action stage. And of course the ones who show up and actually play full out. Because at these virtual events, again, it's not just me lecturing you with pre recorded videos, it's live. We're there together. I'm interacting with people, I'm calling on people, we're doing role plays, we're doing action steps, we're doing breakout rooms. You're gonna go do homework in between the sessions. It gets real, it gets real, real fast and you make the changes real fast. And that's the goal. So if you're in that stage and you wanna make a change, you've been listening to my books, Not Nice and other Materials, this podcast, and you've not been to one of my virtual events or you have and you know you saw the effect, I invite you to come check this one out. Not nice Live. And the cool thing is during the super early brother, tickets are about 80% off what they normally are. So that's an amazing opportunity to take advantage of. And then the key thing though is to show up. I want to just sell a bunch of tickets thinking no one's there, what's the point of that? Right? So commit right now. And if it's not this, then what? Do. Do something. It doesn't have to be with me, doesn't have to be at this event, but it's something. In fact, let's turn that into your action step for today. Time for action. Action, action. So your action step for today is going to be to pick an action and go do it. Now that's, how is that different than any other action step? But it's because it's, you're, when you're doing it, you're showing yourself. I'm, I'm ready to do this. And so pick the action that's going to make you uncomfortable. Then this is going to be an action that stands in defiance to the doubt, to the people pleasing. So if normally you smile and nod when you talk to these certain people, don't smile, don't nod as much when you talk to them. If normally you're avoiding sending someone a message, just go ahead and send them a message. Pick one thing and study it. Choose it and do it. This is going to be a powerful litmus test because if you choose it and you do it, study how you feel. Maybe you do feel uncomfortable, and instead of saying, oh my gosh, that was terrible, you say, yeah, that's exactly where I should be. Or if you don't do it then it might be time to acknowledge you need to invest in something else. I cannot tell you how many challenges I've had in my life where I'm like, I'm gonna do it myself. I'm doing myself. I'm doing myself and do it myself. And then I'm not. I'm not getting the results that I want. And then I go get coaching, I go get support, I go get a program, and then it tips the scales in my favor, and I actually make the change. I can give you dozens of examples. I'll just give you one from business. There was a book that one of my colleagues recommended called Profit First. It's a model for small businesses, I guess any size of business, but really targeting small businesses and just how people can mismanage the business to where they're paying all of their budgets, all their team members, all of their marketing and everything. And guess who they're not paying themselves. And so my friend recommended this to me. He said, look, you know, this would really support you. And so I read through the book, and I was like, this is a great strategy. I should totally implement it. And I didn't. And, you know, he checked up on me about a couple months later. Hey, how's that going? I read the book. Did you like it? Oh, it was great. You agree with the strategies? Oh, yeah. Totally. Should do it. Yeah. When are you gonna do it? Soon, I guess. And then I realized, you know what? Let me invest. I invested, I think, 2,500. $2,500 to work with a profit first coach. And look, the process, honestly, wasn't rocket science. Honestly, I might have been able to do it if I just sat down and done it, but she held me to the fire, and, you know, okay, I'm meeting with her next week. I got to do this. I got to get this thing. I got to set up this thing and change that. And for me, at the time, I said, oh, it's easy and I can do it. But guess what? It was working on my finances and the business and finance and business or at life at that time caused a lot of discomfort in me emotionally. I didn't even know exactly what the discomfort was. It was just an area that I felt scared or inadequate or uncomfortable emotions in. And so I'm busy. I want to help people. I'm going to record another podcast. I'm going to do another session. I'm going to lead another group. That's what I want to do. I don't want to work on this finance business side Right. So I avoided it. And a lot of the stuff that we're scared of, we don't necessarily immediately feel raw terror. I didn't feel like quivering in my boots and my heart's racing when I thought about, you know, the business finance restructuring inside of the, you know, the profit first system. No, I just felt like, I don't know, I'm busy. Right. And that's what you might feel about facing some of these things. And look, here's the. Here's the problem is in order to radically transform your life to become more confident, more free, more bold, you can't just do one thing once in a while that's like, I'm gonna go work out once a week, once every two weeks, and we'll see what happens. Well, I mean, you might, I guess, prevent some horrible atrophy if you use your body a little bit, but man, you're not going to get strong and you're certainly not going to change any body problems or health issues that you have with that level of exercise once every two weeks. So you got to up the thing, up the game. And so if it's really overwhelming or scary or terrible to imagine upping the game now, then what's it going to take? What support do you need? That's why I offer these virtual events. That's why I have all these other programs that I run. And again, if it's not with me, who is it with? What is it with? What are you going to do? And I don't really care exactly what it is, but I care that you choose something and you're honest with yourself if you need more support than you're getting. And there's no shame in that. I've gotten support my whole life from coaching, from counseling, from books, from programs. I'm actually going to remove books from that list, though, because I'm really encouraging you to. To throw yourself into something that's going to give you more than a book. I'm not saying books don't have great solutions in them, but books don't have accountability. Books don't have skin in the game. They cost you 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 15 bucks, 1 credit on audible, 1199. You know what? That doesn't mean anything. You know, there's a program that I recently invested in that was for my own growth, that was $999, and I needed that program. I thought I could benefit from it. I wasn't making the changes that I wanted to. Six months ago, I circled around the drain $999. I don't know. Six months later I'm kind of in the same place. I'm like, alright, damn it, let's go buy that program and do what it takes. So find that for you. Be honest with yourself. Do you really want to change? And if so, what are you going to do to make that happen? Awesome. Thanks for being with me. Until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.